KDE developer Nate Graham is out with the first issue of This Week in Plasma for 2026. Last week was a warning that [1]This Week in Plasma could become less frequent without new volunteers to help takeover. Nate Graham announced that John Veness has stepped up to help co-author these weekly KDE development posts.

This week for enhancing accessibility support under Wayland, Plasma's Wayland session now supports the "slow keys" functionality. Also for improving accessibility the zoom effect now has a mode where the pointer never leaves the center of the physical screen.

For Plasma 6.6, the Emoji Selector app now lets the user select the preferred skin tone for the emojis of hands and people.

Plasma 6.6 will also now treat using a game controller as an "activity" to prevent the computer from automatically going to sleep or locking when using your game controller.

This week one of the most common panel-related Plasma crashes was also fixed for Plasma 6.6. This next desktop release also brings improvements and fixes for OpenBSD support.

More details on the Plasma improvements this week via [2]this blog post .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-This-Week-In-Plasma-2026

[2] https://blogs.kde.org/2026/01/03/this-week-in-plasma-new-year-new-accessibility-features/